Why It Pays to Date an Economist-

Today, I decided I wanted actual proof that Southerners do better on American Idol than other contestants. I created an Excel spreadsheet that marked the top 12 contestants by where they placed in the top 12 (1-12), sex (M or F), overweight or not (Yes or No), ethnicity (Caucasian, African-American, or Other), and Hometown State. APK analyzed the data for me... gotta love the ability to come up with completely useless information. Apparently, none of these factors has any baring on the top 5 even though a large number of them were from the South. However, in the top 12, people do better when they're from the South.

Here's the e-mail I just got from APK.

Aha! I've finally found something...As is CLEARLY evidenced by this regression output -

Table 1 - Analysis of American Idol Contestants 7
15:34 Friday, May 19, 2006
The REG Procedure
Model: MODEL1
Dependent Variable: Rank Rank
Number of Observations Read 60
Number of Observations Used 60

Analysis of Variance
Sum of Mean
Source DF Squares Square F Value Pr > F
Model 4 49.72031 12.43008 1.01 0.4091
Error 55 675.26302 12.27751
Corrected Total 59 724.98333

Root MSE 3.50393 R-Square 0.0686
Dependent Mean 6.51667 Adj R-Sq 0.0008
Coeff Var 53.76871

Parameter Estimates
Parameter Standard
Variable Label DF Estimate Error t Value Pr > t Tolerance
Intercept Intercept 1 7.20664 0.93790 7.68 <.0001 .
SexDummy SexDummy 1 0.01242 0.91053 0.01 0.9892 0.98835
EthnicityDummy EthnicityDummy 1 0.10870 0.90567 0.12 0.9049 0.99788
WeightDummy WeightDummy 1 1.06355 1.33985 0.79 0.4307 0.98640
SouthDummy SouthDummy 1 -1.72671 0.91053 -1.90 0.0632 0.98835
Parameter Estimates
Variance
Variable Label DF Inflation
Intercept Intercept 1 0
SexDummy SexDummy 1 1.01179
EthnicityDummy EthnicityDummy 1 1.00212
WeightDummy WeightDummy 1 1.01379
SouthDummy SouthDummy 1 1.01179

A southerner is likely to finish 1.73 spots ahead of a non-southerner, all other things being equal. Thus either one of two things are true- 1) Voters have a bias towards southern singers, 2) Southern singers are better than notherners. Other than this, neither sex, ethnicity, or body type has any appreciable effect of a singer's rank/performance.